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The blueberry barren on Northport’s Bird Hill is a favorite local spot to hike, stargaze, hunt, paint, watch birds and take senior photos. In the fall and winter, the blueberry plants turn shades of crimson and maroon, and the ledgy hilltop offers arresting views of the Camden hills.
But by July, this spot could be home to an RV resort.
A Massachusetts couple is under contract to buy the property from Jasper Wyman & Son, the state’s largest blueberry producer. They plan to eventually build up to 80 RV sites, clusters of geodesic domes for glamping, and spaces for wellness retreats.
The development would be sited at two contiguous pieces of land totalling 115 acres, about half of it in blueberry barrens, according to a proposal submitted to the town by the developers. While the proposal says wild blueberry land will be kept in production, its design shows that a gravel road, a lodge and RV sites with water, electric and sewer service would be built on the barren.
A group of Northport residents are trying to stop the development. On Monday, they will present a petition, signed by more than 200 people so far, to the Select Board expressing opposition to the resort. They are also asking the board to put a 180-day moratorium on commercial and large-scale housing development before voters.
“Blueberry lands all over the state are a cherished thing, ” said Judy Berk, who lives nearby. “And they’re disappearing.”
Their effort is part of a larger push to protect blueberry barrens from development in the midcoast and beyond — an effort intensifying as Maine’s largest blueberry producer, Jasper Wyman & Son, is selling off hundreds of acres of blueberry barrens in the midcoast, the Portland Press Herald has reported. In Northport, the company also is selling a separate 170 acre parcel, priced at $799,000.
A group of Searsport women, called the Wild Blueberry Collective, is trying to raise $750,000 to purchase 150 acres of blueberry land from Wymans by July. And a nearly 250 acre parcel in Belfast, owned by Allen’s Blueberry Freezer, is on the market for $1.8 million — despite pleas from community members to protect it for public use.
Some efforts to protect barrens have succeeded — last year in Blue Hill, community members managed to protect a scenic parcel of blueberry land slated to become a subdivision.
Blueberry barrens are an iconic part of Maine’s landscape. They’ve been here for hundreds of years, created by indigenous people managing the land to produce berries. These landscapes provide important habitat for native bees and certain birds. And while many are privately-owned, they are often widely used by the public.
But in recent years, the amount of land in blueberry production has been steadily contracting. Blueberry land is currently being lost at a rate of about 8% per year, according to an industry official.
The main driver is economic, said Eric Venturini, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine. Last year’s crop was “devastating” he said, with blueberry producers losing $8 million amid severe drought coupled with excessive spring rain that hindered pollination. Without help for blueberry farmers to invest in infrastructure like irrigation, more blueberry land will likely be lost, he said.
Ratcheting up the pressure is the fact that many midcoast blueberry fields, unlike the lower-lying ones in other parts of the state, are on hillsides with breathtaking views. Land prices are high, and so is the incentive for midcoast blueberry growers to sell to developers, said Lily Calderwood, an associate professor of horticulture at the University of Maine and a wild blueberry specialist with the university’s cooperative extension.
“So it’s a real choice that [growers are] making to continue farming for their enjoyment and cultural reasons and hopefully a profit,” she said. “But it’s certainly not a million dollar profit.”
Venturini acknowledges the incentive to sell off land, but said that wild blueberry farmers want to keep farming, if they can. Many blueberry fields have been in the same family’s hands for generations, he said.
“Nobody wants to be the generation that has to close the business,” he said. ”But if you’ve been losing money for three years and it’s time for you to retire, are you going to convince the next generation to take it over?,” Venturini said.
To Venturini, the best way to protect blueberry barrens is to keep the land in the hands of farmers — but they need public support to survive, he said.
“If people in this state value the wild blueberry industry … we need to invest,” Venturini said.
The industry is currently advocating for two bills in the Legislature that could provide relief and a path forward for blueberry growers, Venturini said. One, LD 2094, proposes a $40 million bond that, if approved by voters, would fund infrastructure, conservation, and climate-resilience projects for farmers. Another, LD 299, would create a permanent fund that would provide low-interest loans and grants to farmers.
The struggles around profitability can also make it hard to protect blueberry land, said Brett Sykes, co-director of farmland production at Maine Farmland Trust. His organization purchases the development rights to agricultural land so that it can remain farmland forever. He hears frequently from people wanting to preserve blueberry land. And, while the group has helped protect some barrens, Sykes says it’s trickier to protect blueberry land than other kinds of farmland.
“The nut to crack is who’s going to be managing these fields,” he said. Blueberry barrens need to be mowed or burned to stay open; without human intervention, they’ll revert to forest.
And his organization only protects land that will be viable farmland into the future. But many smaller blueberry fields haven’t been derocked, and can’t be mechanically mowed or harvested, he said, which means they’re less appealing to commercial growers.
When the Northport blueberry barrens went on the market, Carrie Braman, who is active in the effort to stop the RV resort, reached out to Maine Farmland Trust and a local land trust to see if they could help protect the land, but neither could help.
Now Braman and Berk are hoping the town and voters will protect the barren. And she hopes the Massachusetts couple will reconsider their plans and not try to “profit off the town and the landscape here.”
Northport’s beauty is one of the reasons people want to live there, Braman said. The proposed RV resort would try to capitalize on that beauty, but would inevitably compromise it.
“It would ruin, in many ways, what makes this place so special,” she said. “It is open, it feels undeveloped, it feels pristine.”.
“When you’re selling that off to tourists, you kind of ruin the character of the place,” she said.
